Word: kazoo
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Dates: during 1953-1953
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...playing musical chairs. The percussion man ran back & forth between kettle drums, cymbal and a toy drum, jangled some bells on the way, hammered a xylophone and, with evident pleasure, whammed a huge Chinese gong. Saxophone players switched to flutes, clarinets and even recorders; Sauter himself picked up a kazoo and produced sounds very much like bagpipes. Again the slate and another tune: The Doodletown Fifers. Two men played the piccolo, two the baritone saxophone, one the tenor saxophone. Then the three sax players put down their instruments and whistled. By the time they picked them up again, the second...
Tooting the Kazoo. "The Groaner," as ; he sometimes calls himself, was born in 1904, and grew up in Spokane, Wash. with his father, a fun-loving bookkeeper who played the mandolin, his Irish mother, a somewhat sterner type who often took a disciplinary switch to her children, and six other little Crosbys. He had, he says, a youth notable for dozens of odd jobs, a night in jail (for belting a police car with cinnamon buns), a day when he hurled the leg of lamb on the family board at his brother Everett, an intense hatred of mathematics, a propensity...
After high school, Bing went on to Gonzaga University, but when he found out as a pre-law student that he could make as much as any beginning lawyer in town by singing and tooting a kazoo, he quit school and headed for Los Angeles to break into full-time show business. There, two years later, "Pops" Whiteman auditioned his act, and signed Bing and his partner Al Rinker into the big time...
...sets the mood with chapter headings that consist of fine, nostalgic bits of flotsam from the Bissell memory (e.g., "No knowledge of music is necessary, merely place kazoo to lips and hum your favorite tune''1). His love scenes, which he plainly relishes, are never tedious. ("'The question is,' I said into the sweet smelling hair, 'whether a man of my age could become a Hotel Executive without any previous training. Your hair smells like springtime in Comiskey Park.' ") And the conversation around the plant sounds almost as if it had been taken down...
...faces that she had found surefire in attracting her father's attention. She played billiards on the third floor with her brothers, and harmonized in the music room with her sisters. She beat out hot rhythms on her brother's trap drum and played aggressive solos on kazoo, ukulele and banjo. She admired and envied her stately older sister Clara ("The Duchess"), and made life both miserable and exciting for her younger sisters, Mary Jane and Josephine. Mary Jane recalls: "I can't count the number of dark closets Ros locked...